A new study says artificial intelligence may be dulling doctors’ clinical skills.
While AI is credited with helping health professionals to better detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon, the absence of the technology reveals that their ability to find tumors can drop sharply.
It is thought that the AI examined in the study likely prompted health professionals to become overly reliant on its recommendations. In turn, this led doctors to become “less motivated, less focused, and less responsible when making decisions without AI assistance,” the researchers said in the paper, per Bloomberg.
For their findings, the researchers surveyed four endoscopy centers in Poland and compared detection success rates before and after adopting artificial intelligence. Colonoscopies were randomly performed with or without the use of AI. Compared with rates before AI assistance was available, the study found doctors were roughly 20% less effective at identifying tumors.
One of the scientists involved in the study, Yuichi Mori, a researcher at the University of Oslo, believes the effects of de-skilling will become more pronounced as AI becomes more powerful.
Notably, the 19 doctors who participated in the study were highly experienced, each having performed more than 2,000 colonoscopies. Omer Ahmad, a consultant gastroenterologist at University College Hospital London, says the impact on trainees or novices might be even more dramatic.
“Although AI continues to offer great promise to enhance clinical outcomes, we must also safeguard against the quiet erosion of fundamental skills required for high-quality endoscopy,” said Ahmad, who wasn’t involved in the research.